Comment by rainsford
7 months ago
> Knowing they were 100 feet high and flying into the approach corridor with an aircraft on short final and not taking the controls is an enormous failure on the part of the instructor.
Even if they were out of the helicopter airway, based at least on radio transmissions the instructor thought they had the landing aircraft in sight and presumably thought they could stay separated from it visually. I would agree with you if staying at the exact right altitude and position was being thought of as the primary factor keeping them separated from traffic they couldn't see, but it seems different when they were operating under visual separation and thought they could see the aircraft.
That said, I fly Skyhawks not Blackhawks (or any kind of helicopter), so maybe the expectations are different in the rotary wing world. But my experience is that a 100ft altitude deviation is not an "instructors takes the controls" situation in an airplane unless you're about to run into something. Of course they were in this case, but it's not obvious the instructor knew that.
I also fly Skyhawks - it seems to me, as a helicopter outsider, that they think in hundreds of feet where we fixed wing pilots think in thousands of feet. It would be interesting to hear from a RW instructor, especially one from the army, whether a 100ft altitude deviation is more akin to a student deviation 100ft or 1000ft in the fixed wing context.
True, I was reading up on that accident between news helicopters and it surprised me they regularly kept separation of only 100ft.
Oh it was 200 actually: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/chasing-a-story-the-2007...
Still, very little for a fixed wing GA pilot. I know airliners use pretty low separation pretty much as a rule but they have really accurate autopilots.